Thursday, 11 December 2014

The major transitions in cultural evolution

In their famous work, The Major Transitions in Evolution John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry identified cultural evolution as being a Major Transition. However, a more fine-grained classification than theirs seems attractive to me - and so, in this post, I'll consider what changes qualify as being the major transitions in cultural evolution.

These are my picks for the major transitions so far:

The origin of cultural transmission;

The origin of digital transmission via speech;

Human collectives with specialization (via agriculture);

The origin of writing;

Mass-produced written materials (via industry);

Computers;

The internet;

The list is heavily dominated by two kinds of improvements:

Better storage;

Better networking;

The evolution of cultural evolution has seen developments in
computation, sensors and actuators - but these seem to have
been more incremental - and less like "major transitions".

The next big major transition in cultural evolution looks set to be machine superintelligence.